The present invention relates to the field of a system and method for evaluating the severity of a lightning strike undergone by an aircraft, and more particularly by an airplane.
The ILDAS 1 (In-flight Lightning Damage Assessment System) project, conducted between 2006 and 2009, was a project supported by the European Union in order to validate the principle of an on-board system for measuring bolts of lightning and evaluating the severity of a lightning strike undergone by an airplane, and, in particular, in order to evaluate any damage caused by the lightning on the airplane. The long-term aim of this project was to improve scientific knowledge, but also to facilitate the airplane maintenance operations following one or more bolts of lightning. A test campaign was carried out on an Airbus A320 in 2009. The results of this project were, in particular, presented at the 23rd symposium of the SFTE-EC (Society of Flight Test Engineers European Chapter) held on the 11 to 13 Jun. 2012 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In the context of the ILDAS 1 project, the Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands) developed a magnetic-field sensor technology that was installable on a porthole of an airplane cabin. The principle of such a sensor is that the current injected into the fuselage of an airplane struck by a bolt of lightning generates a magnetic field outside and around the airplane. One means of measuring this magnetic field is to measure the penetration of this field through an aperture in the fuselage such as a porthole. A single antenna installed through a porthole, in the interior of the airplane, allows this to be achieved.
With regard to the promising results, Airbus decided to continue this project and the project ILDAS 2 started in 2009. The objective of the ILDAS 2 project was, inter alia, to obtain a commercializable on-board system for evaluating the severity of a lightning strike undergone by an airplane and, in particular, the damage caused by the lightning strike to the airplane. The results of this project ILDAS 2 were presented during an international conference held at Toulouse (France) on 9 to 11 Sep. 2015 (International Conference on Lighting & Static Electricity—ICOLSE). The architecture of the system developed and tested on an Airbus A350 XWB is presented in FIG. 1. The system developed in the context of the ILDAS 2 project comprises, placed in the interior of an airplane 100, an electric-field-sensing device E (101), eight magnetic-field-sensing devices H (130 to 137), two current-sensing devices I (110 and 111) and two x-ray-sensing devices (120 and 121). The system furthermore comprises a plurality of control units, for recording and processing the signals generated by the various sensors (Data Accumulation and Data Storage—DADS—units).
However, the system developed in the context of the ILDAS 2 project remains a prototype that is not commercially viable because of its installation and maintenance complexity, and therefore its cost. The proposed system furthermore allows only an a posteriori analysis of the data gathered by the sensors and therefore requires the intervention of technicians after each flight to be exploited.
A simplification of the system developed in the ILDAS 2 project was envisioned, retaining only two single magnetic-field sensors placed on the same side of the fuselage of an airplane, at the front and at the back of the fuselage. However, although initial results were encouraging, this simplified system did not work for bolts of lightning having a point of entrance on the fuselage and a point of exit on a wing of the airplane. In other words, only certain scenarios vis-à-vis the point of entrance and point of exit of the lightning on an airplane were covered by such a simplified system.
There is therefore a need to provide a system mitigating the drawbacks of the previously developed systems.